Operation Mad Ball (1957)

A comedy written during Blake Edwards earlier period, directed by Richard Quine; both had worked earlier with Jack Lemmon in My Sister Eileen.  Lemmon's Oscar for Mister Roberts established him as a lead in a number of things all at once, with this film positioning him as a mastermind in charge of a lot of very familiar faces, most very young by the standards they would later become known.

Dick York turns up in Bewitched of course; lovers of The Producers will recognise William Hickey as the drunk at the bar, plus a host of other small roles; James Darren is a young punk whose music career hasn't really gotten started; L.Q. Jones is later a staple character of westerns, notably Hang 'Em High and The Wild Bunch... and Ernie Kovacs is at the height of his short career, cut off by a road accident. He'd work with Lemmon again in Bell, Book and Candle, where the two have excellent chemistry together. There are others besides, including a slightly uncomfortable (by modern standards) cameo by Mickey Rooney, who would appear even more uncomfortably in a later Blake Edwards film, Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Is Operation Mad Ball "good"?  Well, it depends on one's sense of humour. It's 1957, so a lot of the jokes revolve around the usual subjects, people looking dumb, women, misunderstandings... but on the whole, the film is definitely an intellectual pursuit rather than the farce of Edward's later work, particular the egregious later Clouseau films or The Great Race, also with Lemmon. Here the set-ups are familiar to those who experienced that last year of military service in Europe following the end of the war, when this film takes place. Though a military hospital filled with servicemen and nurses, there are no wounded, no strife, no danger... just a lot of unfortunate people forced to go on observing military code dividing enlisted men from dating officer nurses. As such, it's a conscious effort to circumvent rules, conventions and military discipline... which supplies lots of opportunities for humour.

There are a number of clever scams and schemes put in play, some great characterisations, irony, plenty of innuendo and some truly definitive vaudeville bits too; they're all played well, or rather cleverly and with excellent timing, so honestly, yes, in a dry and pleasant way, it's funny.

There's no direct line between this and the later M*A*S*H, but there are some elements where this earlier film or comedy style has influenced the later concept. Still, the connections are tenuous; Altman realised that a military hospital set-up was good for comedy also; whether this film gave him the idea, or he had it on his own, there's no way of knowing.

The Ox Bow Incident (1943)

I wouldn't call this a good picture, but it's here so that I can talk about the nature of film school content and the praise. The Ox Bow Incident is largely canonised because it's seen as a corrective to a cinematic western form of the era, an example of American cinema turning against it's own genre myths.

In the year it was released, the Western was a form normally used to affirm justice, masculinity and frontier morality; pedagogically, the film turned this on its head by depicting an example of collective violence, which I'm not going to state explicitly for spoiler reasons.

Additionally, the director William A. Wellman is praised for showing how restraint works on screen — that is, for filmmakers who fetishise this sort of thing, for reasons of their own. For anyone actually watching the film as, you know, a "film" for the purpose of immersion, it fails on almost every level. The scenes look like sets; the lighting looks like stage lighting; the actors don't look dutifully strained due to the subject material, they look like posed figure-dolls, which is unbelievably grating if one is familiar with the sort of work expected from Henry Fonda, Harry Davenport, Henry Morgan or Jane Darwell. These are all actors who by 1943 had made enough films to look utterly natural on camera.  Here, they look like wax figures, like students performing theatre on a stage. The lines are spoken in a sort of staccato fashion, concentrating on making the extremely obvious point, which becomes so obvious by three quarters of the way through the film that one is ready to quit and just jump to the end... which, by the time it happens, is utterly unsurprising.

Point in fact, the movie was not an especially popular film in 1943. It didn't inspire controversy or debate. It did not redirect the Western, it did not create a film school, it did not make William Wellman into an A-line director and it did not spawn imitators. From an anecdotal point of view, as someone who watched every movie I could as I was growing up, I did not see this one until I was in my 40s. Despite being a Fonda property, it didn't appear on my television in the 70s or 80s, when a great many other westerns did. It was not a fixture of Saturday afternoons, like Big Country or High Noon. It only became a "great film" when a group of film studies professors deemed it so, because it was "deliberately simple," which is something that such people tend to consider the highest form of art.

Film studies courses need films which are resistant to misreading. The Ox Bow Incident is useful for teaching analytical method before students are turned loose upon messier works where interpretation can collapse into projection. Even at that, most people do project their motives onto the film: it is regularly discussed as a revelation of "truth," which is never established; what is established is the lack of procedure, which matters, but as its conveyed here, we don't learn anything. The "message" is obvious, even juvenile. It reveals nothing about the time period it depicts, only the willingness to present something on screen that hadn't been to that time. This doesn't make the film "good." It makes the film "new."

But here it is, presented nonetheless. Because, in my opinion, every film made, especially those made before 1964, ought to be attempted if not fully seen.

Safety Last! (1923)

The logical place to start is with this.

Having learned that frightening his audiences was a way to establish his career, Harold Lloyd planned the above film after two others he'd made based on height-driven terror, Look Out Below and High and Dizzy. Hal Roach and Lloyd had discovered that filming above the "Hill Street Tunnel" gave a long high shot of Los Angeles that made people on flattened 2D film look high in the air. These two, plus Safety Last, were the best known of Lloyd's "Thrill Comedies." The spectacular physical peril of the featured film succeeded in scaring the bejeezus out of audiences, making it a hugely popular picture of the time and a classic even now.

Judging by today's standards, some of the film is tedious in places, especially the repeated gag that compels Lloyd's character to climb the outside while covering for the expert that was engaged to do it. Bits and pieces look cliched now because they've been stolen repeatedly over the last 103 years, if not directly then reworked into other concepts and such until the original suffers from having been filmed so early in film history. Later films would use the combination between stunts and stories to seize audience's imagination and sense of thrill, thus setting the stage for the action films that would not match the scope of this, really, for another 40 years. The conceptual concept of using an existing physical happenstance, the bridge over the city, to make it seem like a huge budget was spent, proved a curtailing restriction on Hollywood until the invention of the "car chase," which ballooned into extravagance in the 1960s. In large part, films of the 30s through the 50s couldn't do what Lloyd did because there was no way to add sound to the format. Safety Last works because it's a silent picture. Talkies could not do this. Lloyd didn't have to account for Los Angeles acoustically, like a film made 10 years later would have had to.